1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image processing, and more particularly to systems and methods for medical imaging with image recognition and image registration capabilities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recognition and labeling of anatomical structures in medical images is a critical step for many important clinical applications such as treatment and drug evaluation, surgery planning, and real-time image assisted surgery. Computer-assisted atlas-based methods have been developed for various anatomical structures to overcome the limitations in efficiency and consistency of pure manual manipulation. Among these applications, automatic recognition of organs and other anatomical structures such as the spine and the blood vessels including the main artery blood vessel aorta and smaller iliac vessels, from medical images such as computed tomography (CT) abdominal images presents a unique challenge due to the difficulties in handling significant variability in patient data, such as morphological and spatial changes between different acquisitions even from a same patient.
For the recognition of anatomical structures, such as, blood vessels in three dimensional (3D) computed tomography (CT) scans of the human abdomen, etc. much progress has been made over the last 15 years. However, more automatic and accurate segmentation methods and systems are still in demand to reduce the work load due to the ever-increasing volume of medical image data. Among many existing methods, region-growing is a popular choice. However, seed selection in these methods is generally done by human intervention, which compromises the degree of automation as well as efficiency of these methods and systems.